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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23622463">Zephyrus</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles'>Dribbledscribbles</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, all I can think about is how the Fears are absolutely going to hunt down 'the ones that got away', including Joshua 'Has the Only Brain Cell in TMA' Gillespie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:35:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,117</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23622463</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Joshua Gillespie is never forgotten. </p>
<p>The Buried never loses him. It waits. Counts his jeering, shunning, teasing steps along its crust. </p>
<p>After the Change, the wait ends. The Buried takes its own turn now. Playing. Chasing. Singing all the promises that wait for him within itself, close, always so close, because he is bound as ever to the ground. Its ground.</p>
<p>Now Joshua Gillespie must run. He cannot stay still, cannot stop pacing, stop walking, jogging, sprinting, or the game will be over. Wherever he dares to rest, it will open beneath him in a wretched, welcoming burst of song, and bring him home. </p>
<p>What the Buried does not know is that Joshua Gillespie is not simply running away. He is following a voice he knew before the world did worse than end. </p>
<p>A voice inside the wind that reeks now, as it always had, of ozone.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joshua Gillespie/Mike Crew</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>228</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Zephyrus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He was at work when it happened. </p>
<p>Just a few floors from the top, ostensibly going over a set of blueprints, but really just basking in the view from the window. Blinds up, facing the east and its golden spray of sun. Had he felt something coming then? Had he known it would be the last sunrise he ever saw, like some ugly tingle of a sixth sense showing up far too late to matter? </p>
<p>Joshua wouldn’t have time to mull it over in the coming days.</p>
<p>Was it days? Hours? Weeks? No way to tell.</p>
<p>All he had known for that instant was that he had lived a strange but lucky life. One that had led him all the way up there, to the seat of his dream job, designing structures that towered from inside a structure that towered, and showed him the sky up close. </p>
<p>When that instant died, so had the sun. In its place was a huge, staring Eye. Among hundreds of others.</p>
<p>That had been the least of it. Not that Joshua would have the time or the audience to bother with describing the Bosch-esque nightmare that abruptly consumed the world, refusing to kill it, but keeping it alive and shrieking in its myriad jaws. No, there was no time at all to consider the world’s Horrors at large.</p>
<p>One’s scope of things tended to narrow pretty damn fast when you discovered the ground itself is out to eat you. You, specifically. </p>
<p>Sure, it gobbled up tons of other people. Masses, tons, scads of folks were all sucked down into dirt and sand and mud, warped and trapped forever, blinded, crunched, suffocated, but never dying. Joshua would see them as he ran, their muck-glazed faces and frantic hands reaching for the open air, pleading mutely with the earth to let them out, to spit them up, to kill them.</p>
<p>The earth—the Buried, it sang to him, just so he was very clear—always has the same answer. </p>
<p>That familiar, crooning song from the coffin. A song which Joshua now understood with a clarity he desperately wishes wasn’t there.</p>
<p>No, the Buried sings. Not now, not ever. You are home. You are within me. You are held tight, held close, full of me as I am full of you. You are forever. You are mine.</p>
<p>Which was nothing compared to the melodies it kept in storage just for him. It had been composing ever since Joshua jilted its offering of the coffin. Rebuffed its welcoming embrace, its crushing peace. Oh yes, plenty of songs just for you, Joshua Gillespie. </p>
<p>They sang them at him as he ran. Walked. Ran again. Staggered. Limped. Crawled. Ran, ran, ran. </p>
<p>Songs of recrimination for snubbing its welcome. For rubbing his denial in its nonexistent face as he plodded on sidewalks or did his jogging circuits around the park or flaunted his nearness by daring to enter a friend’s cellar for a party. </p>
<p>Songs of retribution for his insults. He would keep moving now, on its ground. Always moving, Joshua Gillespie, because that is what he so loved to do when not hiding up in his towers. It had eaten up the one he worked in trying to get to him. He’d barely gotten out of the window—just a yard above the sidewalk by then—and seen the whole thing swallowed by the earth. Since that minute, he’d been on the move. So he always would be. And if he tried to hide in another building, well, it would inhale that too. Keep going, Joshua Gillespie, run, run, run.</p>
<p>Songs of joy at the vision of his collection. It has the perfect spot saved for him. At the very, very bottom of itself. </p>
<p>Deep inside where all is Down, is Choke, is Center, is Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. It would welcome him the second he ended the game. He would be held there on all sides, outside, inside, so compacted into itself that he would be to it as an organ would be to an animal. Joshua Gillespie would be its heart, fused and contorted and eternal within it, beating and churning.</p>
<p><i>Keep going, Joshua.</i> </p>
<p>He is, damn it. He is going. And going. And going. </p>
<p>He had tried his car for all of an hour before the road opened a pothole wider than a pond in front of his speeding tires. Joshua leapt from the driver’s side door just before the chasm could reach out and snap the vehicle up. The crack of that offshoot had veered after him until he got to his feet and gunned it, his breath coming out in cries more than pants. </p>
<p>The crack had tapered off. But Joshua had known better than to be relieved. It knew when he was getting complacent. Not simply because of those stints where he had no choice but to slow his pace to a mere amble. No. It caught onto his relief like an actual odor. </p>
<p>Like it had a little notice that went <i>ping</i> somewhere inside the soil every few un-hours that announced: </p>
<p>ALERT: Joshua Gillespie hasn’t seen any random, grasping fissures opening up around him lately. He is relieved by this. Fix that immediately.</p>
<p>And it does. The Buried always has a spare sinkhole or crater or lurching mass of earth to goose him out of anything resembling calm. Not necessarily to keep him sprinting—casual jogger or no, maintaining a constant sprint would drop him from exhaustion in a few acres and that would end the foreplay too soon—but enough to remind him how irrevocably screwed he is. How there is no escape at the end of this. It's just him stalling the inevitable.</p>
<p>Joshua knows it. The Buried knows he knows it. The Buried sings him another song and gives a playful crumbling rumble directly under his slowing feet.</p>
<p>He's still wearing his work shoes. Not the running sneakers with the special arches, but business-casual things with no laces, no support, and alternates between biting into his Achilles tendons or almost flopping off and tripping him face-first into the ground.</p>
<p>Though he hasn't slept in—???—days, Joshua still manages to have nightmares about entering the earth starting at his head. No last clean breath, no turning his face up and away from whatever would be there to meet him, no chance to even pretend he could stop the soil and worse things from crawling up into his mouth to live there. </p>
<p>
  <i>Go, Joshua. Keep going.</i>
</p>
<p>He <i>is</i>.</p>
<p>His feet kept going as the rest of him wobbles and sags. He's distantly aware that his steps squelch now. Formerly from sweat, now from blood. All the while, a gulf creeps idly after him. Opening like a colossal zipper in the earth’s mantle. </p>
<p>Above him, the sky stares. He knows at least one of those Eyes is zeroed in on him. Waiting for the sad, screaming climax of the journey. Joshua wishes he had the energy to raise a single-digit salute to the oversized voyeur. He doesn’t. Frankly, it’s amazing he’s got the energy to move his legs anymore. </p>
<p>There’s nothing but ache everywhere. <i>Everywhere.</i></p>
<p>His eyes ache with sleeplessness. His lungs ache with exertion from old shrieks and new fatigue. His legs ache with overuse. His feet ache with tenderized soles and popped-blister ankles. His mind aches from simply having kept its lights on so long, from taking in so much of what this unspeakable new reality is without reprieve.</p>
<p>Could he sleep down there?</p>
<p>The thought comes to him unadorned. Devoid of shock at its own implication.</p>
<p> Could he sleep in the Buried? Would that be allowed? Could he rest?</p>
<p>In answer, the Buried sings a new song, composed and moaned on the spot. </p>
<p>Yes, it croons, of course. It does not force the still-ungrateful tenants near the surface to claw at the air it has saved them from. Goodness, no. They are like children who know no better, who refuse to indulge in the gift the Buried has presented them. Down under the song, past the embrace of the soil, there is nothing to do except rest, Joshua Gillespie. Eternal rest without the oblivion of death. Respite. Tranquility. A grip tighter and truer than any pale comfort aboveground could promise. </p>
<p>Are you tired, Joshua Gillespie? Are you ready to take a rest? To sit? To lay? To sink in and Down and never have to rise? Are you? </p>
<p>Joshua takes a step. Another. Another.</p>
<p>Stops.</p>
<p>The ground trembles, thin as the hide of a soap bubble beneath him, ready, ready, ready to let him in, to hold and to have and to Bury in the furthest Pit of itself and what is left of Joshua’s sanity is screeching at him to move, but he is tired, so tired, and the asphalt is dipping, about to collapse, is collapsing—</p>
<p>And then a gust of wind slams into him like a huge, swatting hand and sends him barreling forward another twenty flailing steps. </p>
<p>
  <i>Keep. Going.</i>
</p>
<p>That voice. He can’t tell whether or not he’s really been hearing it on the wind all this time, or if he’s imagining it for the sake of company. Is it a ghost? Considering whose voice it is, and the new state of the world, he wouldn’t be surprised. Sure, why not ghosts too?</p>
<p>Regardless, he is moving again. The Buried grouses only briefly before resuming its splitting of the crust behind him. Joshua tries for the hundredth time not to think about it. All of the prior ninety-nine attempts had failed. No matter how he tries to distract himself, no thoughts of feasible escape or distraction or even a memory of past happiness manages to breach the present. Having something on his mind had always made his jogs go like a blur before this.</p>
<p>The voice in the wind, or in Joshua’s head, or both, somehow manages to stick. </p>
<p>Like a severely emaciated miracle, Joshua finds the memory of the voice’s owner comes to him clearly. It’s the first thing to have sliced through the solid wall of misery that had overtaken his mind since this began, and he flings himself at it, if only to have something other than the present to lose himself in. His pace picks up. The breeze, a thing that for so long had stunk only of blood and wet earth, nudges encouragingly at his back, and takes on a smell that Joshua always associated with the man he recalled. </p>
<p>Some olfactory trick, he decides, not wanting to think on it. He’s too focused on fleeing back into recollection to risk distracting himself with anything else. Though, yes, he makes a note of it: the air around his head now reeks of ozone. </p>
<p>High above and far away, something roars.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Joshua met him on the last day of a business trip to Athens. </p>
<p>The official part of the trip was over, all the right hands had been shaken, he and the other creatives had talked some admiring, congratulatory shop while the people who signed checks in the offices above them clinked glasses. Because Joshua had apparently not learned his lesson about wandering cities he didn’t know the first time, he took another stab at it before making the return to his hotel. He had not gotten lost this time, because he was stringently following a tour group and, no matter how the slavering architect in his heart begged, he refused to leave earshot of the guide’s voice.</p>
<p>He was seeing all the big beautiful historic structures and statues, after all. Getting his photos, speed-running his awe at their ancient majesty, all the little Grecian tourist checkboxes. It didn’t have quite the same mystique as wandering around on his own, taking time to really lose himself in the grandeur as a solo journey might, but he was not taking chances. No more spontaneously-occurring out-of-country Englishmen needing favors, thanks. </p>
<p>Which was a weird thing to fixate on, he knew. After all, there couldn’t be a ton of entities like ‘John’ lurking about, waiting to prey on unsuspecting tourists. Nor freakish objects like the coffin eager to snap up whoever dared to engage with them. Surely not.</p>
<p>And so, of course, he saw the door waiting for him at the Tower of the Winds. Not an ancient entry of carved stone, but a pale, yellow, wooden door that appeared below the segment of the Tower dedicated to Eurus, the East Wind. </p>
<p>It had, of course, waited to appear right at the moment he dared to check his phone, looking away from the tour group to do so. </p>
<p>Also, of course, when he looked up, the group was gone. And as he circled the Tower, the door followed him. East to Southeast to South to Southwest. </p>
<p>Joshua had stopped just short of West, and waited. The door waited too. Wanting him to go forward. To grab the handle and turn. To slip helplessly inside and come out in an infinite nowhere. Joshua knew this intrinsically. Could feel the twisting weight of compulsion snagging at his mind. </p>
<p>As it did, Joshua found he was not going mad, mysterious mobile door or no. </p>
<p>Instead, he was going angry. </p>
<p>“Is this a higher power kind of thing?” He had looked up at the stone reliefs of the wind gods. “Is it?” Back to the door. Was it closer? Had he taken a step toward it? He didn’t care. “Am I just not meant to travel? Because that’s the gist of what I’m getting here. ‘Don’t leave home unless you want every supernatural entity with a gimmick to come around and have a poke at your brain.’ That’s what you do, isn’t it? Have a little jab at people’s peace of mind, right?”</p>
<p>The door didn’t answer, but it didn’t have to. Joshua would swear he heard laughter sweating out of the diseased-looking wood. A high, warbling, tittering noise that made his senses feel sponge-soft and helpless. </p>
<p>This should have disturbed him. It had every right to. The sight and sound of that innocuous, hand-worn doorknob clicking and turning should also have sent fear spiking through his heart.</p>
<p>All it did was flip a sudden, livid switch in his chest. </p>
<p>“There are tons of things like you, aren’t there? I thought it was just the one, some spooky fluke, but no. There’s a whole horde of your sort out in the world, am I right?”</p>
<p>Yes, the door seemed to say. The laughter was louder. A thin crack of a gap opened between the door and the frame. Just enough to show a flash of obscene color and a shifting of something whose default nature was Distorted. Christ, he could actually hear the Capitalized D as he thought it. </p>
<p>“You pretentious, parasitical fuck.”</p>
<p>The door paused mid-ominous creak. As did the laughter.</p>
<p>“Do things like you just throw a dart and decide, ‘hmm, you know, I feel like crapping all over this person’s life for no apparent reason?’ Because that’s the only decision-making process I bet you have. No, can’t even bother to target some bastard who deserves it. Couldn’t go after a serial killer or a human trafficker or a politician, nooo, let’s just go prey on some rando out taking photos for the album. I’m hardly the perfect example, but you know what? </p>
<p>“I bet haunted house assholes like you go out of your way to harass people who never did anything to anybody. People who’re just trying to live their lives, trying to make the best of the little scrap of world they have. Does that sweeten the deal for your type? Knowing that you’re coming to fuck up the life of someone who’s already living in a world where nothing’s fair? Where they’ve got bills and cops and work and heartbreak and sickness and the fucking Tories to deal with already, and then things like <i>you</i>—,”</p>
<p>Joshua leveled an accusing finger at the door. The door suddenly seemed an inch deeper-set into the Tower’s stone wall.</p>
<p>“—come waltzing in with your compulsions and your mind games and your oh-so-spooky caskets and doors and Pandora vases and whatever the hell else, just to what? Prove how much worse things really are? To get off on how menacing your more-than-human capacity for making things even shittier is? You waste. You utter, utter <i>waste</i> of a supernatural reality. </p>
<p>“You know what gets me? Hmm? Can you guess?”</p>
<p>The door couldn’t and didn’t. The opening was a little smaller.</p>
<p>“You’re not even special. Your endgame goals may be different, your particular fetish or flavor of suffering may clash with the next magical monster’s preference, but underneath it all you are all just so, so <i>basic</i>. What’s the difference between you and any other bastard who jerks off to voiding his bowels on somebody’s life? There are CEOs who, given the opportunity to use your kind of power to screw with someone for a laugh, would do it in a heartbeat. Every other weekend, for shits and giggles. Wouldn’t be surprised if half of them already fed their interns to something like you to stay in the top office. </p>
<p>“As for you, specifically? Your whole ooh-look-at-me-I’m-pure-insanity-come-and-get-lost-in-me vibe that you’ve been trying so hard to beam into my head? I’ve seen more original shit on the average teenager’s graphic tee. </p>
<p>“Piss off, get a better playbook, and do something productive, you prick.”    </p>
<p>The door shut. A moment passed, and then there was a telltale <i>click</i> of a lock sliding home.</p>
<p>Joshua refused to even waste a photo on it. Probably it had some ridiculous vampire rules that kept it from being recorded. Whatever. The whole outing was soured and now, even if there wasn’t some paranormal nonsense coming to paw at him, he simply didn’t want to be there anymore. Sighing, he had considered snapping one last joyless shot of the Tower from an angle where the door hopefully wouldn’t spoil it.</p>
<p>He circled around to the side of the West, Zephyrus, and aimed his camera. <i>Shutter-click.</i> </p>
<p>When he checked the shot it seemed fine until he saw the foot of the Tower. No, the door had not gotten in one last petty surprise and slunk around to that wall too.</p>
<p>There was a man leaning against the stone, idly puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette. He was almost as pale as the smoke curling up from it. Washed out in hair and eyes and face and clothes, like he’d been put too many times through a washer with half a gallon of bleach. In the shot, the man appeared to be looking directly at his unaware cameraman. </p>
<p> But when he looked up—either to apologize or to ask in his limping Greek if he could please step aside just a bit, sir, so he could redo the shot—the man was gone. He was nowhere to be seen in any direction. Gone like smoke in the wind.</p>
<p>Joshua wished he could be surprised. He took another, even less-thrilled photo, swore to himself to never travel again, and all but stomped away from the Tower. He spotted the tour group as he was leaving, but didn’t bother to rejoin, full ticket price or no. He wasn’t about to trust any venue that could get up and walk off without him. For whatever reason, he appeared to be <i>the</i> hot real estate for bogeymen and accursed items to pester into dooming himself when left unattended. </p>
<p>A museum, then. A nice, safe, quiet museum where he couldn’t help but be around people. Not the height of interest for him, what with there being far more ancient knick-knacks and mythical artwork than there were, you know, looming feats of Grecian architecture, but still. He would have a nice goddamn time before he returned to the hotel. He <i>would.</i></p>
<p>Joshua nearly pulled it off. Then, while he was passing by Sad Image of X God Cradling Y Human Lover Who Died from Z Mythical Crap #263, there he was. The man who’d been smoking outside the Tower. There was a smell on him. Not of tobacco or cannabis, but a sort of burnt, electrical aroma. Ozone?</p>
<p>Perhaps he’d jumped the gun on assuming he was some otherworldly specter or what-have-you. Maybe the guy was just light on his feet and had zipped off before Joshua had noticed. Joshua was too tired to care either way. The man didn’t appear to notice he was there anyway, the watercolor eyes nailed to the image in front of them. A rendering of Apollo and Hyacinth, apparently.</p>
<p>Joshua had a hard time keeping all the doomed god-mortal couples straight in his mind. Not only were the Greeks not incredibly keen on design variation for their pantheon—these ones have beards, the goddesses are identical just swap out the accessories, you can tell this one is a nature god because of the horns and the third leg he’s got sticking out between the goat haunches—but there seemed to be a universal rule that if someone was too pretty for their own good, some immortal would ‘fall in love at first sight’ and mark them for a Tragic Demise.</p>
<p>As if any of them were love stories. As if there’d been a choice involved for a single one of the poor bastards and bastardettes who got tapped for the honor of playing godly bedwarmer. </p>
<p>The plaque claimed that Apollo and Hyacinth’s case had been different. </p>
<p>Oh, they’d loved each other dearly. Oh, they were smitten with each other. Oh, what a Tragic Fate that befell poor Hyacinth, who dared to spurn Zephyrus’ affection, angering the wind god into flinging the metal discus into his skull, killing him. Oh, poor Apollo, who made flowers of his blood in remembrance. Oh, oh, oh.</p>
<p>Oh, please.</p>
<p>“All kind of look the same, don’t they?” </p>
<p>Joshua looked to the side. The man had shifted his gaze just a enough to show he was talking to him, then nodded up at the canvas. His accent branded him an Englishman. </p>
<p>This would have set some Pavlovian warning bells ringing in Joshua, if not for the fact that he didn’t seem to radiate any overt strangeness. While he wasn’t tall, he wasn’t as oddly runtish as ‘John,’ had been. He had a light build and was dressed in a way that suggested he was just as susceptible to the Mediterranean heat as Joshua, all airy clothes and sandals. The outline of a smartphone in his pocket didn’t look particularly eldritch either.  </p>
<p>Plus, the fact that he could apparently be wounded by something as pedestrian as an electrical accident was heartening. A telltale scar of zigzagging branches climbed up his neck and cradled his jaw on one side. A very mean zap from the sky or a device he shouldn’t have touched.</p>
<p>“These doomed mythological hookups,” the man went on. “Slap a little armor on them and it could be Achilles and Patroclus. Throw in an eagle, wipe off the blood, you’ve got Zeus and Ganymede.”</p>
<p>“Turn Hyacinth into girl and you’ve got the thousand other divine-on-mortal Tinder matches,” Joshua put in. “Half of which being Zeus.”</p>
<p>“Basically,” the man agreed, a smile curling in the colorless stubble. “But they’ve got to have some excuse for why flowers and stars happen. So, you know. Sorry, assorted pretty B.C.E. folks, you have to go.” The watercolor eyes slipped back to him. “I think you caught me at my habit back at the Tower of the Winds. Or maybe you have a lookalike.”</p>
<p>“What? Oh, yeah, that was me. I can delete it.”</p>
<p>“It’s fine. Was a little worried back there, though.” The smile curled higher. “For a minute I thought someone had spotted me and was chewing me out over what a washed-out monstrous prick I was, or suchlike. The exact words kind of turned into mush before they reached my brain, what with the,” he mimed putting a cigarette to his lips, “but I got the impression you were reading somebody the riot act on the other side of the Tower. Wouldn’t have liked to be in their shoes.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Oh, that. No, that was just me having a blow-up at someth—someone who wanted to drag me back into a bad situation. Was not in the mood.”</p>
<p>“Sounded like it. I’d be the same if someone tried me on vacation.”</p>
<p>“Not vacation, really. Just business junk I’m trying to cram a few hours of speed-vacation into before the morning.”</p>
<p>“Likewise,” the man half-sighed. Part resignation, part commiseration. “Can’t go anyplace without sending something Up to the powers that be.” </p>
<p>Chatter had snowballed effortlessly from there. Joshua would think later that it was almost rushed in its ease, as if both of them had the deadline of Joshua’s morning takeoff at the front of their minds. </p>
<p>Michael ‘Call-me-Mike’ Crew really was fine on the eyes and Joshua had more than earned his pride in his own physique. Hard runner’s legs and leaning towards chiseled in the face made it a happy occasion whenever he passed by a mirror. </p>
<p>They left the museum together, had a good late lunch, walked around ogling the city, and ultimately strolled up to where Mike was staying. Top floor of a modest hotel. The windows were left open, letting the breeze puff and sigh against the curtains. </p>
<p>The short of it was: It was good. There had been climaxes and gasps and a lovely, sense-searing ride for the both of them, and it was good.</p>
<p>The long of it was: It was weird.</p>
<p>Though Joshua was content—???—to blame that on the hand-rolled buzz Mike had shared with him. His own blend, he claimed.</p>
<p>What did it do?</p>
<p>Mike’s grin had turned strange. Eagerness tilted towards some secret joke only he was privy to.</p>
<p>“Gets you high,” he’d said. He’d taken the first hit and blown out the stream of pale smoke to prove its safety. The wisps of it were still hanging in the air after Joshua took his puff, breathing out his own cloud. Right off the bat, he knew something was happening.</p>
<p>The smoke was hypnotizing him. Mike’s whorls were moving funnily in the air, rising up, up, up, then plummeting down, down, down, repeating itself in rollercoaster loops and twirls. Joshua’s own exhalation took to circling. It lapped and lapped, twisting into a vortex that stretched from ceiling to bed. In both of these smoke-shows, Joshua swore he saw tiny, wailing smoke-people caught up in their drafts. Never hitting the linen so that they might break apart, but always being yanked back up at the last moment to take the awful trip again. </p>
<p>Mike was speaking as Joshua stared at this, the light hands turning heavier on him. Grasping, turning, pressing at him. Another ride?</p>
<p>Another ride, Joshua must have said. He thought. </p>
<p>And then—</p>
<p>Then they were—</p>
<p>God, he’d never been hit by the effects of a single drag so fast or so hard or so endlessly, infinitely long in his life. Later, he would not be able to convince himself one way or the other if the experience had been more thrilling or more terrifying, and would eventually give up on trying to pry the sensations apart.</p>
<p>Joshua remembered falling. Dropping, firing, lunging down. Then down was Up, and he was in the sky again, surging through the atmosphere, into forever. Another drop, soaring like a living bullet down to the Earth. Around again.</p>
<p>Constant motion, always in the midst of a Flight and a Fall. He couldn’t tell which was worse: </p>
<p>The idea that this strange fist made of wind would finally grow bored of juggling him and splatter him like an egg against the ground? </p>
<p>Or the thought that it would drag him Up and Away into the Sky, into Space, all the way out to the rim of the universe, only to show him, cackling at his dismay, that there was no rim? </p>
<p>No end. Not even an edge for him to throw himself off in the hopes that this bizarre, groping breeze would lose its hold on him and he could find his death there in the mindless vacuum at the boundary of it all. He would just be a lost, pleading speck of life, alone forever with this dragging air that would never set him down, but pull and push and pitch him endlessly further Up into the Vastness of itself.  </p>
<p>Halfway through this ride, he somehow got it into his head to try twisting out of whatever slipstream held him. He’d wrenched away and aside, as if the clinging wind could somehow fumble and lose him. </p>
<p>It did not. This thing that held him was Space itself and there was no avoiding it. But it did humor—even expand on—his absurd escape attempt. It let him twist, and then made him spin harder. It wrapped itself around Joshua in a new formation, tethered like wings to his sides, and all at once, the whistle-shriek of wind flying by his ears was gone. As was the Fall.</p>
<p>Now he was suspended inside the eye of a howling vortex. The whipping air blackened around him, eating away at the earth as it carried him—or he carried it—or both—or neither—and Joshua got a moment to breathe. In the swirling debris he saw houses and cars and the shrapnel of towers that had had his name printed on their metal bones somewhere. </p>
<p>And people. Dozens, hundreds of people he could not hear over the bellowing of his tornado. </p>
<p>Mike was there with him through it all, enjoying the ride. Even in the cacophony of it all, Joshua could hear him, breath humid against his ear:</p>
<p>“Well. This is new. Enjoying ourselves?”</p>
<p>Joshua had not been able to reply. They were all riding together, supporting and supported by each other, Joshua, Mike, the cruel wind, only kind to him now so that it could help him whip the rest of the begging, earthbound specks up into itself, themselves, flung ceaselessly into the vapor.</p>
<p>And then, with a final plunge, Joshua was back. Back in Mike Crew’s borrowed bed, back in his sweat and mess, back under a roof and safely cradled by gravity against the sheets.</p>
<p>Everything tingled. Spasmed. The aftermath of orgasm was there, spilled inside as well as out of him, and he supposed he must have had a good time. He could not get up and walk if he wanted to, at any rate. But most of his focus was on his lungs. They felt too big in his ribcage and the breaths he sucked in to steady them all rattled. </p>
<p>The dampness on him didn’t smell like sweat so much as rain.</p>
<p>Mike was still folded up against his back, lax and boneless. A satisfied sigh broke against the back of Joshua’s head and, perhaps it was just the come-down of the trip, but he swore he heard that whistling of wind rushing past. Even in the muggy afterglow, Joshua felt his skin tighten into goosebumps.</p>
<p>“So,” Mike hummed, “how was it?”</p>
<p>“A lot,” Joshua wheezed after a long minute. </p>
<p>“A good lot or a bad lot?” </p>
<p>“I don’t know. Just,” Joshua forced his breath to steady. “A lot.”</p>
<p>“I’ll be sure to put that on my dating profile.”</p>
<p>The mundanity of the phrase served to finally chip off the larger part of the aftershocks. Joshua even managed to laugh at it. Or make some noise approximating the same. It also served to remind him that this was not the beginning of anything for either of them. No numbers were exchanged, no promises were made to meet up sometime once they were both back in their native land. </p>
<p>Mike struck Joshua as the sort who made a habit of distance. Encounters were always casual, always brief, always fleeting. He’d seen the type before. Too mobile to want anything solid and static. Which was a bit of a relief, in his opinion.</p>
<p>Only once he was safely back in his hotel—the proper excuses made to his associates, some of whom bought his line about getting sidetracked while playing tourist, while those who actually knew him simply nodded and grinned—Joshua allowed himself to admit the truth. Much as he’d seemed nice, even interesting, Mike Crew had scared him. </p>
<p>The more he thought on it, the more certain he became of his own belated intuition, smothered as it had been by unplanned lust and the kneejerk leap at something like normalcy after that weird encounter with the door. That intuition told him Mike Crew’s pleasant-to-ribald interaction with him had been as much a fluke as that coffin failing to lure him into opening its lid. A one-in-a-billion shot of luck that had saved him from…</p>
<p>What? </p>
<p>Vague images of less-friendly endings to the evening danced in his head. Violent ones. </p>
<p>There’d been something about those watercolor eyes that seemed always on the brink of turning icy in their appraising him. And he had felt appraised, hadn’t he? Not just with the carnality of sex, but of meat. As if Mike Crew had been judging whether or not he wanted to take him to bed or to a chopping block. </p>
<p>Drifting off to sleep, he saw the front end of a nightmare. A version of his time with Mike that had not ended with a civil farewell, but with Mike casually dragging Joshua out of the bed, up to the window, and shoving him into the open air.</p>
<p>And when he fell, the ground never came.</p>
<p>The next morning, he’d read that a tourist had fallen to his death in the night. Apparently, he must have climbed to the top of the Tower of the Winds and leapt off, dying on impact. Reading this, Joshua had felt another intuitive prickle. Whatever remained of the man did not line up with the damage that would’ve come from falling a paltry twelve meters. In fact, he’d have bet money that he looked like nothing so much as a flat red smear. Pulped to nothing from a Fall that had started somewhere in the stratosphere. </p>
<p>Joshua had kept his window covered for the whole flight back and smelled ozone the entire time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Now, here he is in the present, shuffling and sprinting on the terra firma that wants to consume him, wishing more than ever that the lunatic throes of that Flying, Falling hallucination would hoist him out of reach. </p>
<p><i>Go,</i> the wind says in Mike’s voice. <i>Go, go, go.</i> </p>
<p>Joshua is going. But God, he is tired of it. Tired of pretending it was going to end any way other than what the Buried promised him in its churning, groaning songs. </p>
<p>The toe of his shoe snags on something and pitches him forward, making him catch himself on hands and knees. It should sting, but the asphalt of the road has long since been sponged up by the dirt it once blanketed. </p>
<p>He lands on soft earth, pliant earth, welcoming, dragging, plush, inviting earth that knows he can’t go on like this, shouldn’t go on like this, a game was a game, and fun was fun, but it is not half so cruel as Joshua Gillespie had been to it, and it will not make him go any further if he is down on his knees, so ready to come Down, come Inside, come rest, come home…</p>
<p>Fingers made of root and soil and loose stone slip over his knuckles and slide gently over the twitching rubber bands that are his calves. </p>
<p>Ready, Joshua Gillespie? Do you call time? Do you give? Do you want to come home?</p>
<p>“Please…” Joshua wheezes, tugging up his hands and legs from the clinging ground, hating himself for it, and hating that he hated doing it. “Please, leave me alone…”</p>
<p>Never, swears the Buried. Never, ever again.</p>
<p>And on the wind—a gust which slams against him even harder, backhanding him feet over head a few scraping yards—a crisper voice with a crisper oath.</p>
<p>
  <i>No. Now go.</i>
</p>
<p>Joshua staggers a few crawling steps forward. This is either not good enough, or the wind has gained new strength, because Joshua is shunted ahead again. The force of it actually seems to vacuum him up and forward, threatening to sand him against the ground if he doesn’t get off his hands. Joshua flails upright as best he can and resumes running. </p>
<p>Only this time, barely half the work is his. Perhaps less. The air around him howls now, shoving without stopping. Even if he’d dug both heels in, he knows it would simply topple and bowl him along like a tumbleweed. So he runs. The Buried grumbles behind and beneath him. </p>
<p>Joshua almost can’t hear it over the roar. Not of the wind beside him, but of something in the distance. The world has several such sounds in it now. All the grunts and growls and ululations of the inconceivable entities that own the Earth. </p>
<p>But something in this noise is different. He can’t say why.</p>
<p>He’s still running when the Buried finally calls the game off. Not by opening a pit under him or rising up in a tide of dirt to smother him. No.</p>
<p>Somehow, it’s done the sentimental thing and brought the symbol of their first meeting back. As a barb or as a reconciliation, there’s no knowing. </p>
<p>All he knows is that the coffin is waiting.</p>
<p>It is there, planted in a broad patch of bare earth, neither chain nor lock to be seen. The lid is still closed. When Joshua gets close enough, he sees that something has scratched out the top two words. DO NOT OPEN is now OPEN.</p>
<p>Open for business. </p>
<p>Open the lid.</p>
<p>Open it, Joshua Gillespie. It’s time. </p>
<p>In apparent agreement, the wind stutters on him. Slips. Joshua reels a few more steps before he’s left teetering at the coffin’s side. Its song moans victoriously through the plain wood. It rises to a choir when Joshua slowly, shakily, pries the lid up and tips it over on the hinge.</p>
<p>He’s unsurprised to see the stairs leading down into his blind, crushing homecoming. Shapes move down there, waiting to escort him Down to the bottom of everything, the Center, his new life as the Buried’s heart, torn out of its grasp for so long, now heading right where he was always meant to go. </p>
<p>It gives him a moment to weep—no doubt in relief, in rapture—as he kneels by the coffin’s mouth. This is alright. He need go no further across this Earth, only further Down. </p>
<p>Then, a word comes to him. One last word from the wind.</p>
<p>
  <i>Dig.</i>
</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>Why dig? Why, when the coffin is here, open to him, waiting?</p>
<p><i>Dig,</i> the wind insists, but this time from a clear direction. He looks beyond the coffin, seeing nothing but more bare earth. Except it isn’t bare. Not completely.</p>
<p>There, ten steps away, is a fractal of zigzagging lines. Joshua had looked it up when he arrived home from Athens and discovered the shape was called a Lichtenberg figure. A mark of electrical discharge. A scar.</p>
<p><i>Dig!</i> The wind screams, whistling so loud it sets his ears ringing. <i>Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, DIG—</i></p>
<p>Joshua is rushing to the spot before he even realizes he’s on his screaming feet again. The wind carries him at least half the way and drops him neatly in the Lichtenberg’s center. Without thought or reason, Joshua claws at the dirt there like an animal, panting and shrilling in search of something vital he cannot name.</p>
<p>The Buried, for all it would applaud such behavior anywhere else, is furious that he would dig <i>there</i>. Joshua has a hazy suspicion that there is some treasure stashed in the spot, an unprecedented trophy it had never expected to win, but would not relinquish for anything. </p>
<p>More, it will not allow Joshua Gillespie to cuckold it twice. How dare he? How dare he abandon it at the altar of itself again? </p>
<p>He doesn’t get to, the Buried sings, groans, growls. </p>
<p>Not at all.</p>
<p>The soil surrounding the Lichtenberg writhes. Trembles. Shapes and sculpts itself into a mass only barely comparable to a hand, and falls on Joshua with such force it knocks the last of his air from his lungs. It leaves him no breath to scream with, only tightens its hold around him and pulls. Pulls, pulls, pulls him toward the coffin. </p>
<p>In his mind’s eye, Joshua can already see it lurching over the wooden lip and plunging him Down its stairs, into the depths and chambers of its innards, punching him Down and Through and In with nothing resembling the mock-kindness of an embrace. No, it had been rebuffed one time too many, and now it would hurt him back for it, drowning him in itself, filling and crushing him so completely he would be no more than a skin-sack of dirt and terror. But that would only be how it started.</p>
<p>Oh, there were so many plans ahead. </p>
<p>Did he ever wonder what it would be like to be trapped inside a little stone chamber that squeezed him until his bones broke and his blood welled at either end, an eternal second away from bursting like a gory balloon? </p>
<p>Did he ever consider a lifetime spent crawling on his belly, frantically inch-worming his way to a safety that didn’t exist, knowing that the things slithering behind him were always mere inches from catching his ankle and dragging him back, breathlessly squealing for a defunct mercy before they went to work on his flesh? </p>
<p>Did he ever think of a version of life where he could not tell consciousness from sleep, because the nightmare of both matched the other too perfectly in their malice? </p>
<p>All this and more is waiting, Joshua Gillespie. Come on Down.</p>
<p>Joshua can only croak and cling to the one thing he’d managed to dig up from the center of the Lichtenberg: a single pale hand. </p>
<p>And as the Buried pulls him, Joshua pulls the hand, crushing it desperately in both of his, hearing the clash of the song Below and the roar Above, wanting more than anything to be done and dead and gone from it all—</p>
<p>And then Mike Crew’s face breaks the surface. </p>
<p>A new scar marks him; a bullet wound perched at the high part of his temple. The hole it should have been has filled. The rot that should have been has never touched him. Too inhuman to die, too weak to escape, too much of the Sky to Sink, too immobile in the mocking soil to Rise. But the Vast is here now, radiating its power in all directions, and he’d been made strong enough to call out, to find the one who would unearth him.</p>
<p>Joshua knows all these things as intrinsically as his lungs know to take in air. Ozone burns in his nose and throat. </p>
<p>The song is no longer in his ears, though it tries to be. It simply isn’t loud enough to cover the roar. Nor is the fist of raging earth strong enough to stay together as the wind falls upon it in a gale that could shred mountains into dust, lift and fling city-states like discs, peel the ground apart into gaping divots and canyons. </p>
<p>Mike Crew’s eyes are open and too, too white. When his mouth opens, a tide of once-smug loam coils out like a huge, russet slug caught on an invisible wire. The wind blows it into atoms. And then Mike Crew is laughing, screaming, crushing Joshua’s hands with both of his own, and they are going Up.</p>
<p>The Buried shrinks to a dark, seething sea of brown in seconds. They do not stop Rising.</p>
<p>Up into the twisting roar of a tornado that had not been there a moment before.</p>
<p>Up and around and beside each other, each clinging, pulling himself in close so that they are a single piece of debris on the wind.</p>
<p>Up against the false ceiling of the Vast, the Sky which never ended, and had never forgotten its stolen, hidden soldier. </p>
<p>It does not know love any more than it knows care, but it knows theft, and to have its property returned by a thing already marked by its endless hand is more than cause enough for conversion. </p>
<p>Joshua knows these things and is so deeply confused at the knowing of them. More-so at the impossible heights to which they’ve ascended. He should not be able to breathe here. </p>
<p>Then Mike Crew’s mouth is welded to his, and the man’s exhalation crams itself between his teeth and pries his jaws open so it may surge into his lungs.</p>
<p>Joshua returns the favor through a reflex he doesn’t recognize. It isn’t breath going between them. It’s the wind. Rushing in, out, back, forth, repairing the last of Mike Crew’s damaged interior, and renovating the pieces inside Joshua Gillespie. </p>
<p>The last motes of Joshua’s human intuition wail at him. He must break apart from this. Must find some way to die, to end in here, to leave.</p>
<p>But he doesn’t. He isn’t even sure if he can. Mike Crew is clamped to him like a vise, his eyes and scar brighter than lightning, and there are more than limbs on him now.</p>
<p>The wind is not Mike Crew’s, though it is of the Vast.</p>
<p><i>Yours,</i> gasps a tiny breeze in his ears, as Mike’s mouth gifts him one last, altering sigh. </p>
<p>
  <i>Mine?</i>
</p>
<p>Though the thought is a whisper in his head, Joshua hears it bellowed at such a thunderous bass in the twisting air that it’s like a tremor. It roars in his voice.</p>
<p>“If I am the Vertigo,” Mike calls over the din, “you are the Vortex. That is the role you accept if you wish to stay Up here,” the electric eyes glance at the still-shrinking Earth, “and not Down there. If you drop now, Joshua, the Fall will not save you, nor dash you against the rocks. The Buried would open the moment before you grazed the crust, and swallow you, and you would never come out again.</p>
<p>“Give yourself to the Vast. Give others to it in your travels. That is how you exist free of the Buried. Or, you could do the moral thing, and Descend. Parasite or prey, Joshua.” </p>
<p><i>Wait—,</i>  the Vortex roars.</p>
<p>“Wait—,” Joshua pants. But Mike’s mouth is on his again. Quick and fleeting. </p>
<p>“No waiting. The mark of the Vast means Space. Distance. I can’t linger anywhere any more than you can. I’ve got to start Falling now. Catch up on lost time. But, again, if you really do want company?” A grin of insidious civility curls. “See how well you can spot the difference between a victim and a villain from Up here. Goodbye, Joshua. Thank you for the ride.” </p>
<p>And then he is pushing away, plummeting down the center of the Vortex’s eye, and vanishing like a breaking cloud before he can hit the earth.</p>
<p>And Joshua hangs suspended inside the Vortex, inside himself, praying that he is dreaming. That he has inhaled a hallucinogenic lie that will evaporate if he waits long enough.</p>
<p>And when he wobbles, just for a moment, as if he stands atop a towering footstool that will pitch him down if he does not stay balanced, he jerks to one side. The Vortex moves with him.</p>
<p>It is a Titanic thing, the Vortex, and even this tiny nudge is enough to sweep an entire cowering town into its spinning grasp. The people try to scream, and find the air doesn’t leave their lungs like they expect it to. Joshua no longer wobbles, but watches them from too many angles as they flail and beg for a kind god to hear, to help.</p>
<p>He is as much this coiling wind as he is the flesh-and-blood core at its eye, and he can see and feel the weight of all their tiny movements within his hold. </p>
<p>He cannot tell if he is more thrilled or terrified at the sensation. He gives up on trying to pry them apart.</p>
<p>Below him, he feels a tickle in the soles of his healing feet, the base of his wind, as the Buried boils with loss once more. </p>
<p>Joshua regards the squalling, weeping things he carries around and within him. Thinks with as quiet a roar as he can:</p>
<p>
  <i>I’m sorry. But it’s better this way. For all of us. Better Up here than Down there. You’ll see.</i>
</p>
<p>They will, in time. He knows it. </p>
<p>The Vortex turns to the west, determined to save even more.</p>
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